Piggies and Bears

Rustic one-story cabin set on vast wooded acres, with pond situated in an open meadow. An idyllic retreat. Surrounded by countryside of rolling hills and working farms, yet also within an easy day trip of white-sand beaches. Interior contains a comfortable living room, an ample dining room perfect for entertaining, one bedroom, and one full bath with green-glass tiles and a clawfoot soaking tub. Spacious, sunlit country kitchen featuring wide-board pine floors painted a soft cream and pale blue in a vintage checkerboard pattern; equipped with a restored antique cookstove and furnished with gleaming copper pots and enameled cast-iron Dutch ovens imported from France and stored prettily on a cornflower-blue shelf and peg rack handmade by the owners.

One might think this is a listing for a high-end house in an expensive historic district. In fact, it’s a description of illustrations in Toot & Puddle, a children’s book.

Admittedly, I’ve always been an eager audience for the humble-little-cottage-in-the-woods fairytale, but the real story here is that those little piggies live in some premium real estate.

A larger family of pigs, in Pigs Love Potatoes, scored themselves a sweet house in a picturesque village, right next to what looks to my eye to be a Gothic Revival cottage. The style of the porch and the wood clapboard seem 1880s-ish, but the windows and some of the interior look circa 1900. And if I had to guess, I’d say that that porcelain-on-cast-iron kitchen sink is original to the house. Conspicuously absent are stock parts from a big-box retailer. And I’m not seeing even a trace of Ikea flat-pack furniture.

Perhaps the broader message these illustrations convey is that the homes and settings depicted are safe, comforting, placid places for the characters in these stories—and for children generally—to grow up and thrive in. My takeaway, however, is that I garnered more ideas for interior decorating while turning through this book again than I did from the last three house magazines I looked at. I marvel at how Mama, even with all those busy little piggies underfoot, manages to find the time for the nicety of potted geraniums and cut flowers, presumably from her own gardens, in so many rooms. And did she sew those pretty curtains on the kitchen windows herself? While I speculate about that, I also make a mental note of the dreamy rose-patterned wallpaper.

When planning trips, I’ve occasionally toyed with the idea of renting a small house, but I never have. That’s primarily because it hasn’t made sense for a family as small as ours, but also because I’d see listings for so-called cottages and think, “Nope, that’s no cottage.” It was probably during those searches that I first really thought about what that word means, denotatively and connotatively, since a very clear image came to my mind: the house of Snow White’s saviors the seven dwarves, of Little Red Riding Hood’s granny, and of the old crone who takes in Hansel and Gretel. Essentially, storybook cottages, a term I hadn’t previously given much thought to. The houses in Toot & Puddle and Pigs Love Potatoes, though more realistic than their fairytale counterparts, are definitely still cottage-y cottages, but kinder and gentler, given that there’s no indication of poisoning by tainted fruit, death by wolf attack, or attempted stew-pot cannibalism having occurred in them.

The chief appeal of cottages is their coziness, but coziness isn’t limited to country cottages. The last pages of the original Corduroy story depict where the sweet little bear has found a home, which seems to be a multifamily row house in the city, possibly Harlem, given the enormous size and heft of that hallway staircase. Lisa, the young girl who purchased Corduroy with money she’d saved, takes the bear to her bedroom to tend to him, and the obviously homemade patchwork quilt and rag rug, as well as the simple dresser and rocking chair, very effectively illustrate Lisa’s gentle character and the soothing homeliness, in the best sense of that word, of her family’s apartment. It’s a scene of perfect contentment, and I can’t think of a better image with which to send a child off to sleep. Having read this book many times as a child myself, to my much-younger brother, I must surely have internalized that visual conception of home. I look around at the décor in my own house, which favors the imperfect, the second-hand, the sentimental, and the homemade, and I can see quite clearly the influence of those pictures on my worldview.

Scanning the shelves of the picture books my teenage son has now outgrown, and opening up and turning through the pages of a few that I can’t clearly recollect, I confirm my impression that picture-book illustrations tend to depict idealized, beautiful houses and, less frequently, apartments. They are also usually realistic looking, if realistic is the word to apply to books featuring anthropomorphic animals and sentient stuffed toys. That said, I find talking animals less unrealistic than the impeccably clean and uncluttered world of picture-book drawings and paintings. Maybe it’s just hard to draw a layer of dust.

Also at play here, though, might be placidity’s evil twin, complacency, and complacency’s kissin’ cousin, smugness. Because I find myself wondering if maybe these renderings of a kinder, gentler world with regard to architecture, interior design, and planning and zoning are not the act of benevolence they at first seem but instead only a financially successful illustrator drawing or painting his or her own very nice living situation.

All I know for sure is that there’s a lot of housing out there that doesn’t look anything like what I’m seeing in these picture books. City councils and town boards all over North America might benefit from studying them.

Outside the realm of realism but still squarely in the comfort zone of cozy is the house in the tree lived in by the Four Bears—that is, the Berenstain Bears. James Bond fans can keep their tricked-out sportscars; I prefer a tricked-out treehouse. I would gladly listen to any didactic message Mama Bear wanted to push out (and it is usually Mama, because Papa Bear is, quite frankly, a bit of a dope) if I, too, got to sit around the table with some fresh-baked bread topped with honey collected by the cubs. Or if I could just have the chance to throw open their casement windows to greet the day and better survey their fine homestead and the wooded land beyond. Seriously: sign me up. Although I suppose in a way I’ve already fulfilled that little daydream, because, upon reflection, I realize that every apartment I lived in as a young adult was on the second story of a dwelling, and my two favorites by far were the ones that felt very treehouse-like, including one with French doors. It was like living in a Berenstain Bears book or perhaps Owl’s house in the Hundred Acre Wood, but with more housing code violations.

The fanciful dwellings of the Berenstain Bears and of Christopher Robin’s menagerie are on the cutesy end of the spectrum, but occasionally illustrations of houses veer into the vanguard.

P.D. Eastman’s 1961 book Go, Dog. Go! was, for instance, decades ahead of the recently reported-on trend of wealthy suburbanites spending extravagant sums of money on decks and other outdoor spaces. A houseboat with a diving board emerging from the second floor beats those suburbanites’ overpriced gas grills and synthetic-wood decks and raises them one.

It’s the houses in Dr. Seuss books, however, that scale the vertiginous heights of fancy and sit unchallenged at the peak. I recall raptly studying his houses, with their shape-shifting rooflines, exaggerated fenestration, precariously twisting staircases, and overall questionable structural integrity. Dr. Seuss houses discard safety in favor of a sense of possibility. They are what can happen when practicality is not a requirement. Kind of like runway couture.

All of these children’s books seem to linger over and relish the places and spaces, but A Family for Old Mill Farm throws all pretense aside and makes the houses the centerpiece of the story. It follows a couple and their young child as they look for the perfect house for them, the eponymous Old Mill Farm being that house. I happened upon the book at a second-hand bookstore and snapped it up for myself—I mean for my son.

I’ve pored over that book so many times, picking out my favorite house, like a kid choosing toys from the Sears Christmas catalogue. It’s kid lit for the Zillow set.

The land or townscape around the houses is just as pertinent. The house that wins their hearts in Old Mill Farm is no great shakes, after all. (It wasn’t my first choice. I preferred the one that was deemed “too thorny.” Or the lighthouse. I could happily live in a lighthouse, at least for a little while.) But it’s the land, the farm, that’s the draw. The space to be who you want to be. The sense of possibility again in a different guise.

In the 1950s book Stop That Ball!—which, by the way, is fabulously fun to read aloud—the ball in question flies over the gorgeous nineteenth-century dressed-stone wall of the boy protagonist’s yard and out into the streets of the town. As the boy chases his ball, we get a brief tour of where he lives, and it’s the sort of place that is just barely hanging on to existence—a small town whose streets are easily navigable by a child alone. Lucky kid, getting to live there.

Blueberries for Sal is more rural, what with having a fruit-covered mountain practically out their back door.

I’ve lived in a village, in and just outside small towns, and in a small city, a medium-size city, and two metropolises. All interesting in different ways. That’s why those who can swing it have summer homes. Small-town and rural life are not the be all and end all, but damn, open fields are nice. That said, open fields are probably loaded with ticks these days. That usually gets left out of the story. Don’t want to stress out the kiddies.

The iconic white picket fence makes frequent appearances in books for children, often as the backdrop to a joyful, exuberant garden. Its gate—the proverbial garden gate—symbolizes the act of welcoming people into one’s home. Of course, it also fulfills the practical function of keeping out officious neighbors. Part of me wants to say that a white picket fence is almost annoyingly precious, but I know how much time, labor, and love go into maintaining the level of perfection it represents.

City living has its own much-reproduced iconic image, the stoop. In kids’ books, the ones you see are often the fancy, substantial brownstone stoops found in parts of New York City, or in urban Upstate New York. Like in Sesame Street, but not a stage set.

If the garden gate is about the outside world coming in, the stoop symbolizes the inside world stepping out. Stoop-sitting is a great enjoyment of city life, and I did my share of it. While reading a book. While enjoying a glass of wine. While watching my son and other neighborhood kids draw hopscotch boards on the sidewalk. In the touching book Stevie, Robert and Steve play Cowboys and Indians on Robert’s stoop. In a child’s game of tag, the stoop is the safety, the home base. Step off the stoop, and you’ve launched yourself into the great big world. Your first step might be into a pile of dog poop some inconsiderate a-hole left for you just past the last step. (This has happened to me.) Or it might be into the wonders of what you can find when you leave the four walls of your house or apartment, if you’re open to the adventure. Like Peter in A Snowy Day, or Harry the Dirty Dog. Their reward, of course, is returning home to a hot bath and a good night’s sleep, Harry’s in a comfy dog bed, and Peter’s in an exquisite antique metal bed frame.

Alas, my own city adventures concluded a few years ago. My husband and I eventually found that we’d outgrown our little house in the city and become fatigued, after two decades, with some of the downsides—having our house graffitied, our garden vandalized, our flowerpots smashed; paying parking tickets; being mugged. That sort of thing. And so we moved, this time to a small village. An ending, but also a beginning. Likewise, with the waning of my son’s childhood years, one of the most meaningful and pleasurable aspects of parenting—reading to my child—has pretty much ceased. For me, an ending, like the portal to the Hundred Acre Wood closing up. For him, of course, a beginning—onward to big things (Oh! The Places You’ll Go!). And so now I have no excuse to read picture books every night and admire the houses. Although, really, who needs an excuse?

Interestingly, my boy is contemplating studying architecture when it comes time to choose his path forward. If he does, I hope that the storybook world where clever pigs can live the good life and stuffed bears are well cared for will remain with him, at least a little bit. And how wonderful for him and for others if in his future he will be a designer of pretty cottages and pleasing apartments and of comfortable rooms that children like Max in Where the Wild Things Are can return to when they want to be where someone loves them best of all.